As noted in the last campaign update post, the PCs found a derelict train with some still-salvageable cargo on board:
After some dice-rolling to determine what from this survived the literal train wreck and its subsequent chlorine release, and then after splitting this among the parties involved in the salvage work (Ponikla, the White Eagles, Von Bahr’s Irregulars, and the emerging Opoczno merchant cartel), here’s the PCs’ share of the haul:
Consumables
1900 rations of canned vegetables 1000 rations of Portuguese Gatorade 3 tons beer = 6,000 bottles (500 mL each) 1.2 tons liquor = 1600 bottles (750 mL each)
3 tons shampoo, conditioner, and hair care products (1kg = 3 person-months) 1.2 tons moisturizing soap and hand lotion 6,000 personal medical kits (or equivalent wound care and surgical supplies) 600 kg antidepressants (pill; 1 kg = 1 person-year) 200 kg antihistamine (pill; 1 kg = 1 person-year) 300 kg potassium iodide (pill; 1 kg = 6 person-months) 600 kg chewable children’s vitamins (pill; 1 kg = 1 person-year) 100 kg anti-fungal (cream; 1 kg = 10 doses) 500 kg disposable syringes (1 kg = 500) 200 kg Lidocaine (injected; 1 kg = 100 doses) 200 kg gram-positive antibiotics (pill; 1 kg = 20 doses) 300 kg epinephrine (injected; 1 kg = 100 doses) 300 kg IV saline solution (1 kg = 1 liter)
anesthetic gas regulator 3x bedside medical monitors (blood pressure, heart rate, pulse oximetry, respiratory rate) medical spectrophotometer tabletop centrifuge CT scanner
I don’t think this is campaign-breaking, given how many things the PCs are trying to do that this won’t help with, but it is certainly an interesting, eclectic, and utterly massive haul.
The expedition team says their (hopefully not final) goodbyes and rolls out of Ponikla under a steady rain. The first leg of their journey is through known territory, areas that are, if not entirely friendly, at least not hostile. The plan is to make for the Pilica upriver of Tomaszów Mazowiecki (whose marauders are hopefully constrained in range by the loss of their hovercraft’s fuel supply) and assess two rail bridges as potential crossing points. They know there’s an intact road bridge at Przedbórz, but they also know a marauder band down there has a ZSU-23-4, so that’s definitely a secondary option.
Travel map at the end of the session; no spoilers. “Fog” indicates hexes that the team hasn’t explored yet (keeping in mind the XP award for such activities).
They roll through Opoczno without incident, pick up the highway, and follow it to about ten klicks outside Sulejów. Going farther west would be tempting fate; among other things, Ellis’ interrogations of prisoners from the Battle of Radom reviewed that the heavily-mauled 124th Motor Rifle Division has moved into Piotrków and is running patrols as far as Sulejów. Thus, the team turns south and heads offroad. They’re aiming for the northern of two rail bridges that they believe should be there, based on their knowledge of the railroad network in the area.
It’s not until they hit a familiar stretch of highway across the river from Przedbórz that Cat’s error in navigation becomes apparent. They’re farther south than they intended to be. With dusk falling, it’s not a great idea to backtrack north along the Pilica’s east bank.
Betsy, seated in the bungee sling behind the UAZ’s M2HB, is the first to spot a streamer of smoke rising above the trees about half a kilometer away. The team quickly repositions for a better look and determines that it’s a large-ish occupied farmstead: a big farmhouse, a smaller bunkhouse, two grain bins, two barns, a machine shed, and a scattering of smaller outbuildings. The stone wall around the central compound has been reinforced and there’s a fighting position on the roof of the larger barn. To Betsy’s eye, it looks professionally-done, within the limits of local tools and materials.
The place is occupied by at least a dozen people, most of whom are going about their late-afternoon chores with one eye on the convoy. A couple have taken up weapons and are watching more intently. Erick and Cat dismount, grab the handheld radio from ILM, and walk in to negotiate.
The woman who comes out to meet them is fiftyish, tall, with callused hands and incredible grip and forearm strength [a potter, though this never became relevant during play]. She introduces herself as Greta Nowakowski. Though she doesn’t say as much, it’s evident that she’s the local matriarch. Erick applies the team’s cover as itinerant mercenaries, turns on the charm, and is able to talk Greta into letting the team stay overnight.
One of the armed men slings his Kalashnikov, opens the gate, and ground-guides the convoy’s vehicles into parking positions between the machine shed and the large barn. The more tactically-inclined team members note that the locations shield them from view from most locations outside the perimeter wall – and put them in a crossfire from the most-defensible buildings.
The compound is occupied by a total of 16 people, the remains of three extended families who’ve fallen in on the most-viable of their farms and expanded it for productivity and defensibility. It’s evident to most of the team that the two younger men are Polish deserters, which probably explains the defenses. Greta notes that they’ve had a couple of encounters with the marauders from across the river, but they haven’t come over in force and the farm’s defenses were sufficient to convince them to go the hell away.
The team pitches in on farm work, including taking ILM out and using its cargo-handling crane as additional assistance for setting some fenceposts. After a few hours of labor in the dwindling light, they’ve earned their keep. Dinner is the farm’s usual communal meal, augmented by the PCs’ own rations. As usual, Magda’s plum preserves and cherry jam are welcome morale boosts.
Miko is on watch while most of the team finishes their meals, so he’s the first to spot torches approaching from the south. It’s a party of three men and a women, carrying an AK, two shotguns, and a bow. Their leader not-quite-demands to speak to Greta.
Greta quickly fills in the PCs. This appears to be a delegation from a larger community – about 500 people, including both the core village and the outlying farms – that sits south of the highway. The speaker is Mirion Zawisza, the miller and a member of the governing council. The Nowakowski+ farmstead does business with the community in general and Mirion in particular but isn’t entirely comfortable with them – there’s a nonspecific but definite unease when the subject comes up.
Four people aren’t that much of a threat, but Pettimore takes up position in a hayloft, and a couple of the other team members swiftly gear up as a QRF. The rest accompany Greta as she goes out to speak to Mirion.
Mirion is quite wroth. A month or two ago, a woman came to the village, a foreigner who still spoke pretty good Polish. She claimed to be a healer, so they let her stay with them. She did some good, but she spent a lot of time collecting papers and broken tools that no one could see any use for. She was up at odd hours, asking strange questions. And she’d arrived with a huge black dog and an uncanny cow, neither of which acted quite right either. Then one of the kids took ill, and her response was to say that she wanted to put things in the children’s blood. She must have gotten wind of the village’s imminent response, and now the hunt is on.
“She’s a witch,” Mirion states with fervent certainty. “Will you help us deal with her?”
Greta assures Mirion that her people haven’t seen any witches, nor uncanny familiars. The travelers staying with her are vagabond mercenaries who’ll be moving on in the morning (she says with a sharp look at Erick, who nods in confirmation). But they’ll keep an eye out. With that, Mirion and his accomplices resume their hunt, moving off to the southeast.
The team confers. Erick inserted himself into the conversation, and from the details he elicited in Mirion’s description, he’s fairly certain that what he heard was someone’s description of a scientist or a physician as filtered through a particularly bad case of regressive brain-fog. There’s some disagreement as to whether this actually is the team’s problem to deal with… they can’t save everyone and this is not on-mission…
Octavia Blumsztajn is having a very bad night. From her hilltop vantage point in the fallen ruin of an old water tower, she can see the literal torches and metaphorical pitchforks of the mob that’s searching for her. She has no idea where Mrs. O’Leary, her saddle-trainedPolish Red cow, has gone, but the villagers clearly haven’t captured the creature. Comrade, the immense Black Russian Terrier who’s been following her around Poland for a while, is still with her and is profoundly unhappy with being prey, but he’s also smart enough to avoid picking a fight he can’t win.
Whatever refuge Octavia thought she’d found in the village is clearly no longer an option. The general regression she’s been observing has turned into full-blown crazy. She’d like to go back for her lab, but what hasn’t been smashed is likely to be set on fire soon. At least she has her lab notebooks and a couple other portable instruments she managed to grab on the way out, and a few days’ food and water. Grunting as her knees protest, she rises to a crouch, shoulders her pack, and heads northwest…
Betsy, Erick, Cat, Miko, and Cowboy head out to see if they can do some good in the middle of this “witch hunt,” leaving Ellis, Pettimore, and the NPCs to watch the vehicles. [Ellis and Pettimore’s players were absent; we didn’t arbitrarily split the party to sideline them.] They haven’t gotten far when the sound of shotgun blasts tells them that at least one of the search parties has encountered something.
Moving up quickly, they spot a mob of about a dozen people, Mirion recognizable among them. Two of them are obviously injured, one down with a huge chunk torn out of his calf and another with a mauled hand and forearm. They have a prisoner, though: a fiftyish woman is on her knees, arms bound behind her back and a bruise rising on her face.
The team moves in, weapons not quite readied. Mirion recognizes them and greets them warmly – in his mind, they’re clearly here to assist in whatever he has planned for the witch. “Her hellhound is still out there,” he warns them, indicating his injured party members.
Erick goes to the discarded pack that the woman was carrying, begins rummaging through it. The locals eye him but don’t interfere. He pulls out a stack of spiral-bound notebooks and begins reading the first one. It’s in English, a personal journal of an American Doctors Without Borders scientist who deployed to Poland when the war in Europe began. He frowns, flips pages, reads snippets aloud. The locals don’t react but their prisoner’s eyes flick to him and she nods incrementally.
The team really doesn’t want to massacre a bunch of civilians, but a peaceful removal of the “witch” is looking increasingly unlikely. Erick’s recitation in a strange language is beginning to draw suspicious glances and the team’s readiness to throw down is becoming evident.
Cat breaks the incipient standoff. “Hey, guys, look at this,” she says as she unfolds her painstakingly-hand-drawn copy of the team’s map.
All but one of the locals lock up or go down in convulsions. The only one to not bluescreen is the one with the maimed hand. “Another witch!” he screams, going for a weapon.
Three things happen more or less simultaneously. Octavia rolls over and bites his leg, Cat body-checks him into the mud, and an immense shaggy black canid bolts from the nearby underbrush and begins mauling the guy’s good arm. No one intervenes until they’ve cut Octavia’s bonds, helped her to her feet, and recovered her gear.
[New PC acquired, hooray! Octavia is the second character of Zenobia’s player.]
Back at the farm, Greta is displeased and resigned. She figured something like this would happen. She doesn’t begrudge the rescue, especially once she’s heard Octavia’s story, but she strongly encourages the PCs to move on immediately. If it becomes an issue, she’ll tell Mirion and his people that the witch’s rescuers held her and her people at gunpoint.
The team mounts up and heads north, putting about ten kilometers between themselves and the farmstead. They make camp near one of the rail bridges they’d intended to investigate anyway and settle in to get some delayed rest.
In the morning, Miko and Betsy set out to check out the bridge. From a distance, the damage is apparent. While it’s structurally intact, it looks like a relatively small explosive charge damaged the rails. The effect of this is obvious: a derailed and mostly burned-out westbound train strewn along the tracks and riverbank, with the locomotive and several cars in the river.
Betsy walks out to look at the damage – she’s not a certified structural engineer but she can improvise. It’ll take a couple of days’ work but she thinks she can make the deck safe for vehicle passage.
Meanwhile, Miko checks out the railcars. Most are smashed or burned beyond repair, but a few are very interesting to his acquisitive little scavenger’s heart:
Random generators and emergent story, man. I told myself there was a 5% chance of a derailment here, rolled that, then hit my encounter generator for a derelict train.
They call in the rest of the team to take a look. The reason these cars haven’t already been looted becomes swiftly apparent: one of the tank cars contained chlorine. Anything metal is suffering from some degree of corrosion, and fear of residual contamination would have kept locals away long after the actual hazard dissipated. But, as far as Betsy and Octavia can tell, what remains is safe to loot now.
Erick and Bell fire up the long-range radio in Comms and call back to Ponikla. As far as Red is concerned, this is an all-hands looting job. He begins reaching out to the White Eagles, Von Bahr’s people, and the Opoczno merchant community, organizing labor in exchange for shares of the salvage.
Looting can wait, though. Betsy starts organizing everyone who isn’t on guard – she has an engineering problem to solve. The expedition settles in to brew fuel. Two days’ hard work (and a couple of minor injuries from pushed rolls) later, the bridge is ready to reopen for traffic. The team beds down amid continuing rain, prepared to break camp and move out on the morning of September 23.
This session suffered from exceptionally poor GM preparation, especially in the area of hexbashing mechanics. Still, the main point here was to connect Octavia with the rest of the team in a more-or-less organic fashion, and we pulled that off.
Octavia Blumsztajn
Doctors Without Borders
A Chicago native of Polish/Jewish descent, Octavia Blumsztajn had never been to her ancestral homeland until the war began. She was a doctor, specializing in research and pathology rather than medical practice. When government funding for her position evaporated in the prewar years, she joined Doctors Without Borders. As the European conflict heated up, the need for relief workers skyrocketed, and her language skills made her a natural fit for the organization’s Polish mission.
Since things came apart, she’s been wandering the countryside, avoiding the ruins of major cities, and trying to do as much good as possible while remaining upright and sane. She was fairly settled near a village until recently, when after a child died horribly from lockjaw, she managed to cook up a batch of tetanus antiserum. Which would have been great, but when she explained what she’d done, the brain fog kicked in – her neighbors had tolerated her weirdness (what’s all this paper she keeps hoarding?) for the benefit of having a healer around. But wanting to to inject their kids with stuff whose explanations caused seizures was a fast path to accusations of witchcraft…
Moral Code: The world has fallen to shit, but you can rebuild it–better, faster . . . eh, you get the idea.
Big Dream: Restore the world to some semblance of civilization.
Build: All the science, with a medical focus on public health. She’s also something of an amateur anthropologist. Octavia has a couple of homebrew specializations that I’ll blog later.
Tools: Science and medicine. Octavia started journaling early in the war and kept it up to maintain her sanity. With the brain fog creeping in, it’s been a literal lifesaver. She’s picked up a Steyr Model 72 hunting rifle in .30-06 and a Manurhin MR73 revolver but isn’t really proficient with them – she’s definitely not a fighter.
Alt: Octavia’s player also runs Zenobia.
Comrade
very good boy
Octavia is not entirely sure who owned Comrade before he turned up hungry, matted, and very much looking for a human. Given the breed’s history, he was most likely a Soviet Army or KGB military working dog. He definitely has protection training and takes commands in Russian.
The week-plus after the Battle of Radom is a time of consolidation and preparation for Ponikla’s denizens. The immediate security environment isn’t 100% – there’s still the issue of the marauders in Tomaszow Mazowiecki, the harvest isn’t looking great thanks to ongoing steady rain, and the area north of the Pilica is a major unknown – but it’s better than it has been for some time. This gives Ponikla’s defenders time to consider other matters.
Ellis and Pettimore are getting antsy. The Broadstreet Dossier suggested that if Pettimore really is displaced in time, several pivotal events are about to unfold down south. The first step to verifying this seems to be an expedition to where Pettimore’s memories and Broadstreet’s writing both indicate the Black Madonna is hidden: a defunct copper mine west of Czestochowa.
The solution, of course, is to split the party… err, to send a well-equipped expedition, posing as military stragglers/mercenaries. Ellis spends a couple of days organizing this, feeling out who’s interested in hitting the road for a while and who’s putting down roots in Ponikla. In the end, there aren’t many surprises.
A fair amount of logistics work is necessary, though. Red, Ellis, and Léonard put their heads together. The expedition will need a scout vehicle, a support vehicle, some combat power, and enough seats for the ten folks who’ll be heading out.
For recon, the team’s trusty-yet-nameless UAZ-469 gets a light makeover, finally completing the up-armoring job that Minka started when she bolted a gun shield on for Leks. This reduces its cargo capacity, but that’s not its job any more.
The main combat power for the expedition will come from Comms, the BTR-70K (command post variant). With a dedicated logistics vehicle in the offing, the tech team strips out most of its short-lived mobile base functionality, returning it to its original seating configuration with an electronics bay that’s mostly unpopulated… but there’s hope for future salvage.
Finally, the team will need a vehicle for a still, tools, supplies, and other cargo. They have a deuce and a half and a Star 266, but neither of those trucks is in the greatest of shape. Red puts out some feelers to the team’s allies and comes up with a few possibilities. The best option is a MAN KAT1 8×8, roughly the West German equivalent of a HEMTT. It appears to have been stolen by U.S. Marines and used for some time before being abandoned in an empty barn north of the Pilica, where scouts from Von Bahr’s Irregulars found it last month, dry on fuel but with an inexplicable recent oil change. The former USMC crew’s names were neatly hand-painted on the doors, along with custom art and the nickname “Industrial Light and Mayhem.”
ILM also receives some armor work and a mount for the team’s spare M249 SAW (some suppressive fire is better than none). A medium still is semi-permanently mounted in the bed, along with two drums of reserve fuel, a couple of rolling toolchests, a field kitchen, and the skeleton of a mobile medical clinic. There’s also space to tie down Thing One, one of the team’s two BMW K75S touring motorcycles.
The plan is to head southwest to cross the Pilica upriver of Tomaszow Mazowiecki, then pick up surviving highways toward Czestochowa. Once across the river, the team will be in uncharted territory – while they have a map, they have little reliable intel on who might be out there, and the map is not the terrain…
With a number of new PCs introduced since we began play in January, it’s probably time for a series of posts to get our hypothetical reader up to speed on who’s who. This post will cover the PCs and NPCs who’ll be going on the road trip, heading south toward Krakow and the mysteries that await there.
Where available, I’m using player-provided character bios and descriptions.
Ellis
U.S. Central Intelligence Agency
Alan Crenshaw spent the years leading up to the war building networks of assets and informants, cultivating relationships through a myriad of different methods serving the interests of the United States. Operating under the cryptonym of ELLIS, he found success in subtly undermining Soviet interests in the region. That is, until the Cold War turned hot.
Moral Code: Deception has kept you alive – it is your armor and your weapon of choice. Never tell the whole truth.
Big Dream: Uncover the conspiracy that actually led to the world being in the awful state that it is today.
Build: Intelligence and investigation initially, bending a bit toward leadership as the campaign has evolved. Ellis isn’t primarily a shooter, but he’s a force multiplier for the shooters if given time to shape the battlespace.
Tools: Disguises, binoculars, and careful rationing of truth. For when things get kinetic, Ellis carries an H&K G3, a Beretta Model 85, and a set of brass knuckles that imprint the name “Manfred” on their victims.
Alt: Ellis’ player also runs Arkadi Sokolov.
John Lee Pettimore
Staff Sergeant, U.S. Marine Corps
MOS 8541 (Scout Sniper)
Pettimore hails from the mountains of eastern Kentucky. Born in coal-mining country, he saw the Corps as an escape from his home county’s endless cycle of poverty and outside exploitation. For a man who grew up hunting to put food on the table, scout/sniper school was a natural progression.
At some point during the war, Pettimore found himself in the orbit of an intelligence operative who called himself Broadstreet. Broadstreet’s small team bounced around the northwestern Poland area of operations, handling a variety of specialized tasks. When the U.S. Army’s 5th Infantry Division moved out for the summer 2000 offensive, Broadstreet’s unit was attached to it.
As the 5th ID died at Kalisz, Broadstreet, Pettimore, and their associates were behind enemy lines, extracting a U.S. State Department physician from Soviet custody. With no friendly forces to rejoin, the team fled south into a darkening world. His subsequent experiences, recounted in a conversation with Ellis and supported by the Broadstreet Dossier, are not entirely synchronized with the surrounding world’s understanding of linear time…
[Pettimore is a PC from the first iteration of this campaign, carried forward with some unexplained weirdness attached to his presence here-and-now.]
Moral Code: Never leave a man behind. Everybody goes home. God gave you the strength to ensure that.
Big Dream: Home.
Build: Sneaking, seeing, and sniping, as implied by the job title.
Tools: Faith which has so far withstood some unusual challenges, a rigid moral code, and Thoughts and Prayers, a Dragunov which is becoming more than its designer intended.
Alt: Pettimore’s player also runs Alexei Brandt.
Erick Myers
Corporal, U.S. Army
MOS 71M (Chaplain Assistant)
Born and raised in rural Minnesota, Erick, though caucasian, was essentially raised bilingual (Ojibwe) as all the signage in Bemidji was in both languages. Never quite big enough to make it big in hockey, he still played throughout high school, and even into college. He attended Bemidji State University, graduating with a degree in social work in 3 ½ years.
The early days leading up to the conflict perhaps to be known in future history books as WWIII saw him working within the Ojibwe tribal system. He objected to the involvement, and registered as a conscientious objector. As the war escalated, he was drafted and sent into the Army despite his status, and only though persistence managed to work towards the MOS of chaplain’s assistant instead of being thrown into the light infantryman meat grinder.
He was sent overseas, attached to a rotation of units, serving under veteran chaplains of many different denominations. Raised Catholic, he still served with a Methodist, Jewish, and Anglican chaplains, and began to develop an appreciation for each. His own view on religion expanded, and he found himself creating his own hodgepodge system of belief from the best of what he encountered.
Then, as the war raged on, he encountered combat. As chaplain’s assistant, he was required to carry and use arms to protect the chaplain he served. Despite his athleticism and skills, he watched two such superior officers bleed out from wounds that his meager first aid skills were no match for. Instead of shaking his beliefs, this only intensified them. By 1999, he no longer assigned to any particular chaplain, but was merged into whatever mix of units could be cobbled together. Wherever he went, he became the impromptu chaplain for his company, squad, or fire team. His degree in social work made him a skilled and sympathetic shoulder to lean on, and he was a source of morale boost to whomever would listen. Finally, he was part of a ragtag battalion that was enveloped and overrun, and he was taken prisoner. Thinking that his war was over, he resigned to keeping his fellow POW’s spirits up, daring to pray for a release…
And so it seems that his prayers have been answered…
Moral Code: Protect his buddy and any in their flock (“Faith with Firepower”, the chaplain assistant motto).
Big Dream: Expand his religious experiences, taking in whatever he can from whatever he encounters.
Build: Something of a utility infielder, but concentrated in the Agility and Empathy skills. He’ll likely develop more toward a medic concentration over the next campaign arc.
Tools: Erick hasn’t gotten much screen time yet; he’s one of the rescued POWs who started off as an NPC and was adopted as a backup PC. He’s carrying an AK-74, a Walther PPK, and some extra medical supplies, but as the expedition’s primary medic, I expect he’ll be loading up on more medical stuff.
Alt: Erick’s player also runs Leksik “Leks” Müürikivi.
Build: Pretty much what you’d expect for a scout and forward observer.
Tools: Ideally, a good radio and a friendly battery of 155mm. Currently, an M4A1, a Colt Python, and a satchel of grenades.
Alt: Cat’s player also runs Minka.
Kira “Cowboy” Lopez
Private First Class, U.S. Army
MOS 13M (Multiple Launch Rocket System Crewmember)
Kira was raised on a cattle ranch in the Texas panhandle by an impatient, frequently drunk, father and her Hispanic mother. Until her mother died in a car accident in the late ’89. Her father became unbearable and she blamed him for the accident. Their relationship got worse as she got older, and spent as much time away from the ranch as she could get away with. She left Texas for California as soon as she graduated from high school in ’93. She was sick of rural life, sick of her father, and everyone else knowing your business, and wanting to live pretty much anywhere else.
In Los Angeles, she apprenticed to an electrician, thinking it would be a good way to make a living doing gigs for rich people (or something like that) and it was alright for awhile. She worked hard, often being willing to work from before dawn until it was too dark to work safely. On the weekends she partied hard, hanging out with the metalheads and goths, going to concerts and night clubs. On Sundays, once she kicked out anyone she might have come home with the night before, and if she wasn’t too badly hung over, she’d go to church, thinking her mother would be even more disappointed in her if she didn’t.
When the war broke out, she had the misfortune of having an early draft number. Cowboy won out as her nickname in boot camp because she was absolutely willing to throw fists over “Cowgirl” innuendos, and somebody else already got to be “Texas.” She ended up in artillery when her math skills and understanding of trajectories and coordinates indicated she’d be good at it.
Now that the war is effectively over, Madga’s speech has her reconsidering her desire to live anywhere other than some rural shithole, realizing that now…everywhere is a shithole, and it’s going to be mighty hard to find food in an urban shithole. For once, a small, close-knit community might be okay. Besides, if she ends up back in the States, they’d probably send her somewhere else to fight…and she knows she doesn’t want to get involved in a civil war back home.
While she used to think she’d prefer someplace like Valhalla for an afterlife, Kira always remembers to light a candle for her mother and her ancestors on Dias de Muerte, and has included people from her unit who’ve died over the course of the war.
Moral Code: She isn’t a Ranger, but she very much believes in never leave someone behind.
Big Dream: Motivated by Madga & Red, maybe help make at least a small part of the world a better place.
Build: The nature of 4th Edition’s skills means a competent artillerist is also pretty good with squad-level support weapons, and Cowboy is the expedition team’s primary machine-gunner. She’s also a decent technician generalist.
Tools: In the absence of a replacement MLRS, she’s making do on a smaller scale with a PKM. If she weren’t leaving Ponikla on the expedition, she’d probably be taking charge of the village’s newly-acquired mortar.
Alt: Cowboy’s player also runs Dr. William “Red” Greyson.
Elizabeth “Betsy” Reed
Private First Class, U.S. Army
MOS 12C (Bridge Crewmember)
Like Cat, Betsy is a newly-adoped NPC whose history is still shaping up. She’s one of the 5th Infantry Division POWs rescued in transit to the Radom camp. We know she was an M60 AVLB crewer in the 7th Engineer Battalion. She’s something of an adrenaline junkie and her prewar career saw her wheedling her way into as many sapper and combat arms courses as she could manage.
Build: Heavy on technical capabilities, a decent driver, and decent with support weapons.
Tools: As much demo and as large of a hammer as possible. She’s currently toting an HK23, a Browning Hi-Power, and an assortment of grenades and mines.
Alt: Betsy’s player also runs Magda Szymanska.
Mikolaj Krol
Miko is a Polish teenager from Warsaw who spent most of the war just trying to survive and stay out of the way of the armies. History gets a bit hazy during early 2000, but he’s believed to have met Zenobia Slusarski in Warsaw and followed her when made her escape to her hometown of Ponikla.
Miko is mildly-unhinged, adapting to his post-apocalyptic surroundings in ways that the rest of the team finds somewhat concerning. Of all Ponikla’s inhabitants, he may be the one who’s embraced the apparent nanite infection’s benefits the most. His fighting style displays a complete lack of disregard for self-preservation.
Moral Code: The world fell apart around you, you need to keep what little bit of it you can call yours.
Big Dream: Comfort is a dream long dead, as is safety. But I’ve been safer here longer than anywhere else. Can I make it better?
Build: Initially focused on scavenging and stealth, but he’s been developing toward excessive force and skirmish combat.
Tools: A complete disregard for personal safety and a machete. Until recently, Miko also relied on a satchel of grenades, but Cat took those away from him after some injudicious application of white phosphorus. He carries a PM-84 SMG that he may have fired in one battle.
Luis Hernandez grew up in New Hampshire in the shadow of Mount Washington. Being able to see the peak with the reputed worst weather in the country spurred what would become a lifelong interest in meteorology. After completing his undergraduate studies at CU Boulder, he spent a couple of years working for the National Weather Service, but desk-bound work was eating his soul. When a co-worker mentioned that the Air Force had its own meteorologists, Luis skipped lunch to visit the local recruiter’s office. A line on a list of job options leaped out at him: “Special Operations Weather Technician.” It sounded pretty badass…
After the war’s first year, aviation and airborne operations were vanishing, and with them, opportunities for Hernandez to do his real job. He wound up bouncing around a variety of units, using the usual AFSOC cross-training to fill in for specialists in other roles. He was attached to Task Force Cobalt to run communications and was the other survivor of that unit that the team rescued from marauders.
Build: Fieldcraft and technical capabilities foremost, but he can hold his own in a gunfight.
Tools: Science, an M4A1, and an M11.
Henry Bell (NPC)
Specialist/4, U.S. Army
MOS 98G (Signals Intercept Linguist)
Before the war, Henry Bell was a saxophonist in the U.S. Army Band, in it for the G.I. Bill benefits. No one was more surprised than he when he was deployed to perform his original MOS as a signals intelligence voice intercept linguist. He spent most of the war in a SIGINT truck behind the lines, trying to pluck Soviet transmissions out of the air.
Bell was the first of the 5th Infantry Division POWs that the team encountered and liberated. He’s since found himself in the role of Ellis’ aide-de-camp and an occasional backup driver for the team at large.
Build: Social and investigation. He’s not much of a combatant. Bell can speak Russian at native proficiency, is fluent in Korean and Polish, and is working on his pidgin German.
Tools: Good ears and a better voice. He carries an AKM but tries to avoid situations that would require him to use it.
We’re 25 sessions into the campaign, and with the Battle of Radom being a major milestone, it was time for a meta check-in session.
We’ve introduced a number of secondary PCs – currently, six of my eight players have a secondary character. The original intent was to provide backup options for play when the primary PC is down with injuries, or in case of primary PC death (which we’ve managed to avoid… so far). The cast also has grown with the addition of a number of military/ex-military NPCs who provide useful support or combat capabilities and are usable as “rental” backup characters. All of this worked well for the Radom story arc, as a number of characters wound up injured or in the wrong place. In the long term, though, we can see it causing some complexity issues.
We also have a number of story hooks outside the Ponikla area. Because this campaign may or may not exist in the same continuity as its previous iteration, there’s some player interest in investigating the alleged paranormal goings-on around Krakow. Not all of the PCs have this interest, though. A number have put down roots in Ponikla and are invested in the community’s well-being and ongoing recovery/rebuilding operations in the region.
With the buildup of a plot framework, we’re getting away from the campaign’s original design intent of West Marches-style play. We’re seeing a couple of factors driving this. Because there is plot rather than episodic dungeon-crawls, there’s a tendency to push for inclusive scheduling when everyone can make it. Also, I have not done a great job of seeding the map with dungeon-esque points of interest.
As this post’s title telegraphs, our solution for several of these concerns and interests is to split the party. Six PCs and a small number of NPCs will be heading out into the wilds for an extended expedition (which may well lead into adaptations of the rest of the classic Poland modules: The Free City of Krakow, Pirates of the Vistula, and The Ruins of Warsaw). The rest of the cast will remain in Ponikla. We’ll split our sessions between the expedition team and the Ponikla team as player interest dictates.
The guns are silent. With their command post and mortar battery overrun, the ZOMO forces have quit the field. At the now-abandoned patrol base northwest of Radom, our weary and battered collection of protagonists assembles. Also arriving are two more forces…
First, there’s a leadership contingent from the White Eagles, a Skarzysko-Kamienna-based battalion of the Polish Home Army, including:
Major Felicjan Kozlowski, the White Eagles’ commander
Captain Aleksander Grabowski, Kozlowski’s adjutant
Lieutenant Marietta Rabarchak, commander of the White Eagles’ B Platoon and the PCs’ nominal advocate among the White Eagle command staff
There’s also a slightly smaller delegation from Von Bahr’s Irregulars, the band of former East German troops who threw in with NATO when Germany reunified, subsequently found themselves in a Soviet POW camp, escaped, and wound up in loose possession of a small hydroelectric power plant:
Lieutenant Colonel Boris Von Bahr, the East Germans’ commander
Senior Warrant Officer Thekla Adler, Von Bahr’s SNCO and chief advisor
The leaders of the various groups assemble (Red, Ellis, and Leks having jointly assumed the mantle of leadership for Ponikla’s defenders) to share intel and discuss the battle’s outcome. All but a handful of the Soviet advisors are accounted for, either dead or captured. The Soviet QRF is out of action, decisively defeated. The Radom ZOMO still has over a hundred combat-capable troops, but it seems to be in disarray – with its command staff dead or in Ellis’ hands, the more experienced cavalry and mechanized infantry platoons have withdrawn to the east, while the late-war conscripts and recruits of the foot infantry platoons are huddled in their base.
A couple of White Eagle trucks pull up and a handful of partisans begins setting up a field kitchen. Magda wanders over to help and winds up taking over.
A couple of Von Bahr’s troops came in with him and Adler as a security detail. Alexei wanders over to chat with some fellow Ossis. Amid the small talk, he learns that before the ZOMO started pushing them, the Irregulars were running patrols north of the river. They’d found the remains of several marauder (or presumed marauder) groups – cleanly and professionally killed, their remains marked with signs indicating their alleged crimes. Someone out there is cleaning up the neighborhood…
Ellis has been busy in the battle’s aftermath. After wrapping up “interviews” of the higher-ranking prisoners taken from the QRF, the ambushed convoy, the Soviet advisors, and the ZOMO command staff, he’s starting to develop a clearer picture of what threats remain in and around Radom. He also has a few new radios to play with, so as he organizes his notes, he and Bell sit down with headsets and begin scanning.
It isn’t long before Ellis and Bell hit paydirt. They intercept a transmission from the Soviet engineer unit in Radom giving a SITREP and requesting orders. The ZOMO have lost cohesion and the Soviet plan for stabilization in the Radom AO appears unsalvageable. The response – presumably from Reserve Front HQ in Lublin – is noncommittal. The engineers are ordered to stand by for orders in two hours.
Ellis notes the time… he’ll be back for the next episode of this show.
The joint command group has some things to work out. Chief among them is how much latitude Von Bahr’s Irregulars will be allowed. They’ve been good neighbors thus far, but the Home Army is leery of letting Germans on Polish soil have too much free rein.
After some negotiation, a joint security agreement exists between the Ponikla defense force, the Irregulars, and the White Eagles. The Irregulars will retain possession of the hydroelectric plant and its surroundings, including the adjacent village of Bialobrzegi, but they’ll allow the other parties access to the plant and will cooperate with infrastructure restoration efforts. The White Eagles will take the lead in securing Radom, including dealing with the elements of the ZOMO garrison who may be salvageable – mainly the post-1997 recruits who weren’t part of the prewar regime protection force.
With the social aspects out of the way, the groups begin dividing the spoils of war. Our protagonists come away with the UAZ-452A ambulance (everyone agrees that Red, as the only qualified doctor in the region, needs that), the ZOMO transport unit’s Star 266 heavy truck, and the Soviets’ Toyota Hilux technical and its AGS-17. Ellis requests the Mercedes S-Class from the convoy, as well… “I have a disguise in mind,” he says.
On the topic of armament, Ellis is adamant that his team keep the AT-5 launcher after the amount of blood they shed to get it. Kozlowski is fine with this, so long as it doesn’t wind up in Von Bahr’s hands. The team also gets an SPG-9 and one of the three 82mm mortars. It’s a significant boost to their anti-armor firepower after months of relying on rifle grenades and disposable rocket tubes.
As that discussion is winding up, Ellis gathers everyone around the radio. On schedule, the Soviet engineer detachment receives orders to negotiate with the local partisans for the return of captured personnel…
Pettimore, out on the perimeter, sees two sets of headlights approaching. He crawls over to the White Eagle RTO who’s been assigned to him and calls in the alert. One of the vehicles halts a couple of kilometers out; the other keeps coming. As it approaches, Pettimore can see that it’s a HMMWV with Soviet identification markings sprayed on the doors. The gun ring is empty. The occupants are a young man with junior enlisted rank insignia and a woman with captain’s rank tabs. Pettimore puts the reticle of his captured Dragunov on the driver and waits…
At the camp, there’s a brief stir, but this isn’t entirely unexpected. Ellis, Red, Leks, and Kozlowski go forward, with Von Bahr hanging back as the joint command group’s designated survivor in case this is some kind of ruse.
The HMMWV stops a few hundred meters away. Both occupants emerge. The driver slings his AKM and leans on the hood. The passenger unbuckles her pistol belt, drops it on her seat, and begins walking forward, waving a white flag.
The command group waves her forward. When she’s within conversational distance, she introduces herself as Captain Danila Marchenko. She’s a whipcord-thin, hard-worn thirtysomething with a bad case of thousand-yard stare.
Out in the darkness, Pettimore is too disciplined to allow his finger to tighten on the trigger.
Marchenko asks about the state of the Soviet POWs. A little of the tension cranks out of her posture when she hears that Major Maksim Volkov, the QRF commander, is alive. (Ellis’ interrogation of Volkov revealed that he and Marchenko are close friends and related by marriage.) “I’ll need proof of that,” she holds out.
Kozlowski gives the necessary orders. About twenty minutes pass before a truck arrives from the nearby farm where the prisoners are being held. A handcuffed Volkov emerges and takes in the scene.
Marchenko asks what it will take to get the prisoners released into her custody – just the Soviets, she has no orders regarding the ZOMO and doesn’t really want them back. The command group presents the demands they worked out while waiting for her to show up: withdrawal of all Soviet forces from Radom, withdrawal of support for the Radom ZOMO, and halting the planned demolition of the half-completed Soviet base adjacent to the FB Radom weapons plant.
Marchenko frowns slightly at the last point – the demolition orders came as part of her conversation with Lublin. “You’ve been listening,” she says, unsurprised. “I can do that. I have better uses for that Semtex anyway.” She turns and waves her white flag in a semaphore-like move. Through his scope, Pettimore sees Marchenko’s driver reach into the HMMWV and pick up a radio handset. The farther vehicle’s lights come on again and it begins crawling in slowly. It’s a 5-ton truck, two crew in the cab and an empty bed – presumably the vehicle that’ll take the prisoners away once the exchange occurs.
Volkov has been watching and listening with an expression of intense concentration. As the conversation pauses and the process of bringing the Soviet prisoners forward begins, he speaks at last. “Mister Broadstreet. You’re not like the ZOMO, like these.” He gestures at Kozlowski. “You’re awake.”
Ellis nods. “Yeah, that’s a thing.”
Volkov looks around the group. Looks at Ellis speculatively. Narrows his eyes. “Library.”
“Huh. Map,” Ellis responds acerbically.
Volkov nods slightly, exhales. “You’ve seen it, then.” He gestures with his cuffed hands, encompassing the world with an abortive, jingling sweep.
“We’ve seen some things,” Leks puts in.
Volkov cocks his head at the accent and looks up at the big Estonian. “Let me guess. You didn’t wait to be captured before going over to NATO.”
Leks grins.
“We could have handled the Baltics better,” Volkov admits.
“What have you seen?” Red asks, still turning over in his head the implication that Volkov has access to, or at least knows of, an intact library.
The Soviet officer shrugs. “We’re reconnaissance. They send us to find things. We… find things.”
“The training and drills you were running. That wasn’t just to keep their edge, was it?” Ellis asks rhetorically.
“No. Routine is the mind-killer. Days blur into days and people… lose time.”
“What else?” Leks prompts.
Volkov inhales sharply. “The first sign I couldn’t ignore? There was a village. They were friendly, but something took three of my men on three nights. We found what was left. No one would talk to us except one old woman, the one everyone else pretended wasn’t there.” His eyes meet Minka’s and he quickly looks away. “She told us enough. So on the fourth night… I had three female soldiers with me. I put them on guard duty. It couldn’t blind them, couldn’t lead them away. They caught it. It had a woman’s face. What was underneath…” he flinches. “Green, wet, and all teeth.”
Volkov looks at him sharply. Nods. His eyes track back to Ellis. He stands silent for a long moment, then something inside him breaks loose. “Damn you! We were trying to help here. We were here to stabilize this. Something’s happening up north, something in Warsaw.” His expression tightens as he sees the recognition in the Americans’ and Poles’ eyes. “Radom was supposed to be a bulwark, a shield against whatever’s coming from there. Establish some kind of order here, get the ZOMO under control and civilized again. Deal with the bandits, the anarchy. Be ready.” He makes a throwing-away gesture, frowns as the cuffs pull one hand after the other. “It’s your problem now, Mister Broadstreet.”
Ellis and Red look at each other. We could have worked with these guys passes unspoken between them.
Air brakes hiss, breaking the tension as a truck pulls up behind the group. White Eagle troops begin unloading Soviet prisoners. Marchenko crosses to stand next to Volkov, who’s mentally ticking off names and faces.
“If we see any of you back here,” Ellis says conversationally, “we’ll shoot you.”
Volkov snorts. “Don’t worry. If you see me back here again, you’ll probably have bigger concerns than shooting me.”
There’s a long silence. “Yeah. I get that,” Ellis admits.
Volkov holds up his wrists, jangles the cuffs again, raises an eyebrow. Leks waits just long enough to inject some doubt before grunting and producing a key.
Volkov rubs his wrists, as if reassuring himself he’s actually free. He doesn’t offer his hand before he turns to leave.
PDF’d and posted because I’m too lazy to fight with reformatting it for here. This rolls up the team’s status and that of their allies and opponents, as well as the major captured items of interest. It’s not exactly an in-character document but it’ll probably drive a lot of discussion during the next session of play.
[I’m blogging this separately for readability, but this scene ran in parallel to the mortar battery raid, with focus shifting back and forth at appropriate moments and at the end of each combat round. This scene had Ellis and Miko being played by their regular players; Cat being run by her player, whose primary is Minka; and Scott being driven as a rental by the player behind Red and Cowboy. Quinn stayed an NPC, as all she was doing was driving.]
It’s been a long afternoon of light rain, high humidity, and fruitless searching. The UAZ-469 with Ellis’ detachment aboard is crawling through the Polish countryside, staying in concealment and off main roads as much as possible. Patience is in short supply as the team rolls up from the south side of another little cluster of buildings at another nameless crossroads. Leaving the UAZ in a scattering of trees, Ellis, Miko, and Cat ease forward to scan with their binoculars…
Jackpot. On a rooftop on the north side of the not-even-large-enough-to-be-a-village are two men in Soviet uniforms with something Ellis hasn’t seen in a long while: the thick tripod-mounted tube of an ATGM launcher. About fifty meters closer to the team, near the actual crossing of the roads, two more men are hunkered down in a rubbled building. Cat picks out the wavering line of a radio antenna next to them, and the angular shape of a parked GAZ-66 light truck nearby.
The team crawls back to the UAZ to discuss tactics. The enemy forces are all on the north side of the settlement and oriented northward. Ellis’ quick analysis is that they’re waiting for Von Bahr to try a breakout to the west so they can neutralize his T-72… but they don’t appear to be watching their backs yet. So Ellis, Cat, and Miko will sneak forward to take up positions in buildings on the south side of the road. As soon as the firefight kicks off, Quinn will floor it out of cover, allowing Scott to bring the UAZ’s mounted M2HB (a recent replacement for the PK appropriated by Cowboy) into action.
At least, that’s the plan.
As Ellis, Miko, and Cat approach their selected buildings, they hear the faint rumble of a vehicle approaching the crossroads from the east. Ellis sees it first – it’s a battered BTR-70, one he recognizes after spending a good number of hours around it listening to its radio.
[With Magda strapped into one of the litters and unable to do her usual navigation job, Bell and Erick got a little turned around on the way out of the battle area…]
The Soviets aren’t unaware of this either. The launcher crew begins reorienting to the east and the duo in the rubble also swing around. It’s the latter group who catches sight of Miko and shouts the alarm, and the fight is on. As the first shots ring out and Ellis ducks into the nearest building, he catches sight of the BTR hitting the brakes and beginning to reverse into a J-turn.
Miko opens with a fragmentation grenade, stunning both of the troops in the rubble pile. Ellis and Cat exchange inconclusive fire with the duo atop the building. This attracts the attention of a third pair of Soviet troops, previously unseen by the team, who were stationed in another rubbled building on the north side of the village. Fortunately for our protagonists, they go for their rifles rather than engaging with the RPG-7 they’re carrying.
Both lightly injured, the two men in the southernmost position begin pulling back north toward the GAZ-66. Scott and Quinn arrive in a screech of tires, but Scott’s initial burst of .50 goes wide. One of the Soviets pulls himself into the GAZ and mans the PK mounted in the cab’s gun ring. His return fire tears through the UAZ’s cargo compartment and sends Scott and Quinn bailing out of the vehicle.
Miko dashes across the street and into another partially-collapsed building to hurl another grenade. This one goes wide, its only function to attract attention. Four AK-74s chatter and Miko goes down, bleeding out from a brachial artery wound [bleeding shoulder crit]. The RPG team starts running south, bypassing Miko and maneuvering to flank the team.
Cat continues trading fire with the Soviets on the rooftop as Ellis sneaks out the back of their building. He sets up just as they come into view. A burst from his G3 drops one Soviet in his tracks and sends the other scurrying back to cover. The two men trade fire and injuries for a few moments, Ellis finally resorting to his sidearm to drive off his opponent.
Cat moves up and boards the UAZ as Scott and Quinn resume their positions. The little jeep-analogue rolls out again, screeching to a stop between the GAZ-66’s machine gun and Miko’s prone form. Cat bails out and drags Miko to cover as Scott and the GAZ gunner trade fire, an exchange that leaves the GAZ with a leaking radiator and Scott with an injury that forces him and Quinn out of the UAZ again. Scott props his RPK across the UAZ’s hood and continues firing, managing to keep the ATGM team on the roof from making the situation any worse.
Cat gets Miko back in action, for certain values of “action.” With his functional arm, the teenager preps and tosses a grenade toward the GAZ. It flies true…
… and explodes in a shower of hellfire. Miko wanted to see what his recently-looted white phosphorus grenade would do. The two Soviets aboard the GAZ die screaming. Enraged, the ATGM team pops up and hammers Miko flat with another volley.
Horrified, Cat slams Miko down to the sidewalk and strips him of any more grenades before trying to resume treatment.
This is the point at which Ellis’ opponent returns to the main fight, appearing behind the pinned-down quartet and lobbing a frag of his own into their midst. Cat and Scott both catch fragments and are knocked prone. As the man levels his AK to finish the job, Ellis emerges behind him and casually empties his Beretta 85 into the soldier’s back.
Cat picks herself and her M4 up and blasts one of the ATGM team off the roof. His partner, realizing he’s the lone survivor, finally surrenders. As Cat resumes trying to save Miko, Ellis shakes his head, reloads, and walks over to see if the radio survived.
Running this in parallel with the mortar fight was a study in contrasts. I was genuinely afraid I might wipe this party. The dice just did not go in their favor until the last few rounds. The final damage was:
Ellis: Health 1/4, Stress 5/6
Miko: Health 0/5, bleeding shoulder crit
Cat: Health 4/5, Kevlar vest destroyed
Scott: Health 1/5
Quinn: somehow uninjured, but also two-dimensional
This effectively concludes the Battle of Radom series. I’ll try to get some informational posts up so readers can keep track of all the secondary PCs and NPCs who’ve been introduced, and I also am considering a referee’s perspective post about the overall story arc here. There will be one more game session dealing with the battle’s aftermath, but due to scheduling and wanting everyone at the table for that, it’s about a week out at best.
At a crossroads near the former ZOMO command post, the team and a few of their allies link up. Using the radio aboard the captured UAZ-469, Leks established contact with Zenobia while she was delivering ammunition to Von Bahr’s troops, and the two groups were able to reunite. Ellis’ raiding party, lacking a radio of their own, remains out of contact, its whereabouts and status unknown.
The raid on the command post was costly. Magda and Cowboy both went down, the latter with a critical arm injury, and Pettimore also is leaking. An immediate medical evacuation and the addition of some reinforcements are necessary before the team goes after the ZOMO mortar battery. Erick, re-added to the group after he and Red finished with the last round of surgery, will command the medevac, with Bell, Ortiz, and Ross rounding out his crew. His job is to get the worst-injured team members – Magda, Cowboy, and Pettimore – out of harm’s way in the BTR-70K.
Von Bahr’s RPG team has stuck with the irregulars from Ponikla thus far, but their task now is to watch the ZOMO command post and maintain custody of the prisoners and material taken there. If enemy reinforcements show up in force, they’re to bug out.
This leaves Leks, Novotny, Turner, and Minka to go after the mortars with the OT-64. Joining them are Zenobia, back from the supply run, and Betsy, newly arrived with Erick.
[Nudging my players to build backup PCs a few sessions ago is paying off now. Betsy hasn’t been on screen until this session, but she’s the ex-POW AVLB crewwoman, the backup PC for Magda’s player.]
The team cross-loads their APCs, spends a few last moments with wounded comrades, and splits up – one group going toward safety, the other heading back into the line of fire.
Somewhere nearby, Alexei Brandt pedals his bicycle and its attached cargo trailer down a mostly-paved two-lane road. The light rain that’s been falling all day hasn’t been able to mask the sporadic sounds of fighting in the area, and the East German teenager hopes he doesn’t get caught up in it. His luck runs out, though, as he rounds a bend and sees a farm whose field is sprouting three hastily-dug pits, each tenanted by trio of Polish militia and the long tube of a mortar.
[Alexei is the backup PC for Pettimore’s player. I hadn’t planned to bring him in for another couple of sessions, but Pettimore’s injuries and this scene gave me the opening I needed to get him into play.]
Alexei tries to ride by casually, but as he passes the turnoff to the farm, three sentries – two more Poles and a third in Soviet uniform – yell at him to halt. They move away from their vehicle, a battered pickup truck with some sort of heavy weapon mounted in the bed, and approach him, ordering him off his bike. Alexei complies, raising his hands.
“What are you doing here? This is a restricted military area!”
Alexei shrugs. “I’m sorry, man. I didn’t see any signs.” He gestures to his bike’s trailer. “I’ve just got stuff, you know? Like, salvage.”
[This is not a verbatim transcript but it’s pretty much how the conversation went.]
The two Poles exchange a look. “What do you have?”
“Ah.” Alexei starts pulling things out of the trailer to display them. A set of engraving tools. A technical manual for BMW 3-Series automobiles. A snorkel and a set of swim fins. “Just stuff I’ve found, y’know?”
“You, uh, got any smokes?”
The Soviet, much more alert and hanging back a few meters, shakes his head in resignation.
Alexei grins and produces a half-carton of Marlboros. “Sure do! What do you have for trade?”
I may have had a bit too much fun setting up Alexei’s initial trade goods from my random loot generator. On the other hand, I’m very curious to see what shenanigans my players get up to with an adult-size Easter Bunny fur suit.
At this point, the trade deal is interrupted by the bellow of an engine and the squeal of tires as an OT-64 bearing extensive but superficial combat damage charges into view from the south and makes a skidding, swaying turn onto the farm’s driveway. Alexei and the sentries scatter, diving for cover.
Aboard the OT-64, Minka’s eyes widen as she recognizes the East German boy who worked the last prewar summer for her as an exchange student farmhand. “Don’t shoot the kid!” she yells as she, Betsy, and Novotny open fire. The broadside volley drops the ZOMO troopers where they stand and drives the Soviet toward the cover of the nearby trees.
Turner hits the brakes as the APC barrels toward the technical parked in the driveway. There’s a horrifying screech as the vehicles trade paint but neither one sustains serious damage. In the turret, Leks brings the KPV into line with the nearest transport vehicle, a Tarpan Honker with ZOMO markings and an attached cargo trailer, and mashes the trigger –
[Penetrating damage, 1d10 table… a 5 is… cargo.
Oh boy.]
Pretty much exactly like this.
The OT-64 rocks in the blast wave as seventy 82mm mortar shells detonate. The blast half-flattens the nearby command tent, smashes the front of the adjacent farmhouse, and stuns the battery crew into inaction just as they were beginning to react to the sudden appearance of a very hostile APC.
The 40mm grenade that Minka sends toward the command tent is almost anticlimactic. In its wake, she bails out of the APC, Betsy hot on her heels. Both women sprint toward the abandoned technical and its automatic grenade launcher.
“Minka!?” Alexei hauls himself to his feet and starts running in that direction. As he passes his bike, he grabs one of the items that he didn’t intend to offer for sale.
The Soviet advisor who was on sentry duty folds as Alexei swings en passant and dives into the pickup’s driver’s seat. Betsy wins the race by a stride and leaps behind the AGS-17 while Minka clambers aboard. The engine cranks and the tires fling gravel.
Sporadic return fire begins to crackle from the farmhouse windows. Leks ignores it to put his sights on the Star 266 heavy truck visible beyond the building. His salvo tears the fuel tank to shreds, sending a couple hundred liters of flammable alcohol gushing onto the fallow fields. The lone crewman there decides he isn’t being paid enough for this and begins running as fast as his legs can carry him.
Now alone in the OT-64’s passenger compartment, Novotny [piloted by Miko’s player] grins and puts a 40mm tear gas round through one of the farmhouse’s open windows.
Turner steers the APC around the farmhouse, surprising a trio of ZOMO who staggered back there after escaping the command tent. Their AKM volley does little more than chip more of the OT-64’s paint. Leks saves ammo and lets Novotny return fire, dropping one and convincing the other two to behave themselves.
The mortar crews are starting to get organized, grabbing their personal weapons and firing from their positions. Betsy’s freshly-appropriated AGS-17 thunkathunkathunks out a volley at one of the mortar pits, suppressing the trio of ZOMO there.
The OT-64 swings around the parked Star and the farmhouse to put all three of the mortar pits under its guns. This is about all the survivors can take and weapons begin to fly out of the pits.
This was designed as an easy fight if the players could neutralize the AGS-17 and the machine guns on the trucks, which they did rather swiftly. However, I ran this in parallel with the hunt for the Soviet advisors’ commando team, switching back and forth at dramatically-appropriate moments and at the end of every combat round. That fight… did not go as dramatically in the PCs’ favor.
After consolidating and reorganizing, Leks is leading Bell, Cowboy, Pettimore, Magda, Minka, and Novotny in a headhunting raid against the ZOMO command post. This is their best chance to disrupt the ZOMO assault against Von Bahr’s unit to ensure that their allies retain control of the derelict-but-repairable hydroelectric power plant.
Ellis wasn’t able to extract an exact location for the command post during his interrogation of captured Soviet QRF leaders – they legitimately didn’t know – but the team has a general idea. They’re looking for an elevated position a few kilometers southeast of the battle, close enough that the Soviet-supplied radios will enable the ZOMO commander to control his maneuver elements and mortar battery. Magda takes a look at the map that Zenobia recovered from the QRF HQ and points to a string of low hills. “There.”
In a small dot of woods a few hundred meters south of the position Magda indicated, Magda, Pettimore, and Cowboy slip out of the idling OT-64 and head north. As the stealthiest characters on this operation, they’re charged with pinpointing the CP’s location and calling in the rest of the raiding force. Because they have good Recon rolls and it’s no fun to play out hours of aimless searching, they find it, creeping in from the east amid light woods.
It looks like the ZOMO field force used this as a base camp before the cavalry and mechanized infantry moved out for the assault. A large number of tents are scattered around a clearing atop the hill, but none of them appear occupied at the moment. Trench lines to the north and south host a quartet of disinterested sentries. The hill’s crest to the west provides a natural barrier there. In the center of the camp are parked a Land Rover 110, with spray-painted camouflage over its original British paint scheme, and a UAZ-469, wearing ZOMO markings and sporting a large radio antenna. A half-dozen people in mixed ZOMO and Soviet uniforms are clustered around the rear of the latter vehicle.
No tokens because I once again failed to get a screen shot before the scene began. The map is yet another of Pulpscape’s fine creations from the eponymous Patreon account.
Without radios, the team is back to more primitive methods of signaling. Cowboy tosses a red smoke grenade out of the treeline to the south. There’s an immediate reaction from the command post. Shouted orders send the nearest sentry climbing out of his trench to investigate. He’s almost to the source of the billowing crimson cloud when he sees and hears the OT-64 bellowing its way up the slope toward him. He turns to shout and run.
Cowboy opens fire on the cluster of officers. She’s carrying a PK and the heavy 7.62mm rounds tear into the group, dropping one of the ZOMO officers and suppressing the rest. The two Soviet advisors are faster to react, ducking for cover and moving to the rear of their Land Rover.
The roar of a large engine turning over alerts the recon team that they’ve overlooked a major and potentially fatal detail. On the north side of the camp, the crew of a BTR-50P is cranking their ride. From the factory, such a vehicle wouldn’t have been much of a threat to the oncoming OT-64, but it’s been up-gunned. A DShK heavy machine gun is pintle-mounted at the commander’s hatch. Of greater concern, though, is the SPG-9 recoilless rifle whose long tube sits atop the roof.
Magda sprints toward the BTR. She’s not much of a mechanic but she knows that most engines stop if you punch enough holes in them. The crew is focused on getting their weapons into action against the OT-64 and doesn’t see her until the muzzle of her Tantal is jammed into the engine’s cooling louvers.
[Does a BTR-50’s engine bay even have cooling louvers? I don’t know. Nor do I care. It was an awesome maneuver in play.]
No one was expecting this shit.
Magda dumps an entire magazine into the BTR-50P’s engine compartment [bypassing the armor]. A cloud of dense white smoke erupts as thirty extra 5.45mm holes exceed the engine’s designed tolerances. Magda has just forcibly parked the ZOMO’s greatest anti-armor asset… but its guns are still in play.
Bell pulls the OT-64 onto the map just in time for an SPG-9 round to sail over his head. He begins driving evasively, throwing off the gunner’s aim for a follow-up shot but also giving Leks, Minka, and Novotny a horribly unstable firing platform.
Despite the swerving and bouncing, Leks’ hand on the KPV is steady. His return fire tears into the BTR’s glacis. The loader slams a round home, though, readying the SPG-9 for a second shot.
Fire begins reaching out from the trenches as the sentries react. Rounds ping off the OT-64’s hull and further damage the coaxial PK. Leks, undeterred, keeps hammering the BTR. Minka returns fire from the overhead hatches while Novotny dismounts and charges a trench.
[We really need to have a chat with Miko’s player about these tactics…]
Cowboy shifts fire to the Land Rover, tearing its suspension to shreds. The Soviets continue pulling gear from the back of the disabled vehicle. Pettimore sees one of them loading an RPG-16 and puts a round close enough to suppress him, but the anti-armor rocket launcher is still in play.
Magda, isolated at the camp’s northeast corner, comes under fire from the north trench’s sentries. She pulls back around the BTR’s corner, reloads, and begins trying to suppress the vehicle’s crew to keep them off their weapons.
Minka reloads her GP-25 and puts a 40mm round into one of the trenches. The ZOMO officer and sentry there are hurt [which the explosives in enclosed spaces rule from Urban Operations definitely facilitated], but neither man goes down.
A heavy rifle round slams into Cowboy from a heretofore-unrevealed sniper team atop the western hill crest. Pettimore reciprocates with a headshot, demonstrating why he’s the superior sniper, but the spotter is still in action. He’s nestled in behind a G3 and he flips the selector to full auto and continues firing on Cowboy. She goes down with a shattered elbow, bleeding out. Pettimore adjusts fire and coolly puts a round into the spotter too.
[The sniper team was up there observing the battle with a spotting scope. It took them a couple of turns to reorient on the unexpected fight and pick the best target. They should’ve gone for Pettimore first]
One of the northern sentries exits his trench and rushes Magda. There’s a close-range exchange of fire which ends both both parties injured and out of ammo. Enraged and desperate, Magda pulls her gardening knife and charges her adversary, but the initial exchange of blows shows she’s outmatched. Pettimore attempts to intervene in the melee, but his rifle finally fails him, going down to 0 Reliability:
A rifle butt smashes Magda in the face and she falls. The ZOMO trooper’s triumph is short-lived, as Pettimore swaps weapons and drops him around an arrow in the stomach.
Leks continues trading 14.5mm volleys against SPG-9 shells. The ZOMO gunner can’t seem to hit. Leks isn’t so handicapped. His KPV finally chews through the BTR’s front armor, killing the commander and sending the driver (who’s been hiding in his seat with nothing to do) into headlong flight.
Novotny overruns the southeast trench in a point-blank exchange of fire that ends with him standing atop two dead ZOMO.
Pettimore drags Cowboy into cover and begins applying immediate aid to keep her from bleeding out.
A final volley of fire from the ZOMO survivors disables the OT-64’s coxial PK. Leks curses, turns over the turret to Minka, and dismounts to press the assault with his MG3. The Soviets go down in a barrage of fire, having never gotten a shot off with their RPG-16. This is enough to force the three surviving officers, the BTR’s driver and gunner, and the one remaining sentry to surrender.
This was an ugly fight, ending with two PCs down, one with a crit. The dice made the BTR-50 tougher than the numbers say it should have been, but its crew passed a surprising number of Coolness Under Fire checks to avoid forced bailouts. For all that, they got like four or five SPG-9 shots off and never actually scored a hit.
